Hand-held consumer electronics are constrained by their small screen size. Ultra-portable projectors, or pico projectors, allow consumers to enjoy a large screen experience in portable electronics, such as smart phones, notebook computers, digital media players, game consoles and cameras. OEM Customers indicate that all key technology elements are ready with the exception of a light modulator that meets cost, form-factor, resolution and power requirements.
Syndiant’s technical advantage lies in its patented architecture, which uses powerful but elegantly simple parallel processing to enable the world’s smallest and highest resolution light modulating chips used in ultra-portable or pico projectors.
Syndiant designs and manufactures the world’s most innovative all-digital LCOS microdisplay technology for near-eye, ultra-portable, and high brightness projection systems. From early WVGA displays to the latest 4K UHD, Syndiant continually shapes the industry.
Building upon established Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) and high-volume semiconductor manufacturing processes, Syndiant all-digital smart panel technologies power a large screen HD+ experience in handheld and wearable devices.
Core to the digital technology is Field Sequential Color (FSC). With FSC, a full color image is decomposed into red, green, and blue color fields. As the microdisplay images these color fields in rapid succession, the human visual system integrates the light to perceive the original full color image. Compared to a traditional LCD display with dedicated pixels for red, green, and blue data, field sequential color achieves higher resolution in a compact formfactor.
Color field update rate is important to eliminate a visual artifact known as color breakup. Highly configurable Syndiant displays are immune to breakup through a fast 540+ color fields per second.
High color field rates require high speed liquid crystals (LC); however, these LC blends typically have very asymmetric rise and fall-times. Compared to complex multiple pulse digital schemes, a single pulse technique based on pulse width modulation (PWM) has the advantage of ensured monotonicity where longer duration pixel drive time equates to a brighter output regardless of liquid crystal switching characteristics.
Syndiant on-display processing efficiently generates a single pulse from encode pixel values to simultaneously drive every pixel on the display device. Independently controlling millions of pixels while updating at high field rates of field sequential color would be impractical without on-display processing.
To perform the very large number of operations required, Syndiant displays employ a small highly parallel processor with a Single Instruction, Multiple Data Stream (SIMD). A very simple bit serial processing element (PE) per column of pixels runs the same operation or instruction but with data based on the value of the pixel.
On-die scratch memory buffers pixel data being processed and enables a very fast “context switch” between two colors as they sequence. The scratch memory has only a few bits per pixel and none of the bits are dedicated to any given pixel. Memory is constantly re-allocated to different pixels based on proprietary algorithms that leverage the bit serial processing to reduce the number of processing cycles, save power, and minimize the amount of on-chip memory required.
Enabling 4K UHD and beyond, Syndiant’s all-digital Q-View technology brings Ultra High Definition to pico-projectors and mobile near-eye.
As displays move to higher resolutions, power consumption tends to increase linearly with pixel count. Since a 4K display has 4X the number of pixels as 1080p, power consumption of the display backplane will also increase by 4X.
Q-view technology requires almost no additional power consumption in the backplane; 4K Q-View has virtually the same power consumption as a native 1080p backplane. Plus, with Q-View the optical engine can be designed for ¼ resolution, reducing cost of lens design and manufacturing.
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